Paper Short Abstract:

We explore the rites of distinction, surveillance/control, and hospitality in entrances of gated condominiums and apartment buildings. The socio-material worlds of guards and concierges and their rich social and cultural knowledge are central for understanding political urban security projects.

Paper Abstract:

In recent decades, socio-systems of security and control and its countless technical devices that have structurally and socially pervaded Brazilian cities. Although security guards and concierges play an important role as social and technological mediators in daily life, their practices and security perceptions received little attention when compared to other security professionals. Due to an urban structure and a market that favours private security, these agents are responsible for access control to buildings while ensuring that everything follows a certain order that we call the urban hospitality-security complex. Professionals are responsible for protecting people and property, handle surveillance devices and environments, while also purveying a sense of safety, hospitality, and cordiality. We are interested in how guards and concierges perform macro and micro socio-technological politics of distinction, control, and hospitality in cities such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.

In this presentation, we will explore the rites of distinction, surveillance/control, and hospitality in entrances of gated condominiums and apartment buildings. We argue that the socio-material worlds of guards and concierges as well as their rich social and cultural knowledge are central for understanding political urban security projects. These professionals participate in the reproduction of social, racial, gender, and material hierarchies. They make sense of them from within the structures and daily experiences of inequality. We will show how their observations, critics, gossip, suspicions, sensations, and imaginations mediate the socio-techniques of distinction, control, and hospitality that constitute the urban security-technological socialities pervading contemporary Brazilian urban lives.